* Travel except to one's summer villa was rare for an aristocratic
woman.

Women's
Daily Life and Work in Ancient Rome

The Good WifeRoman writers tell us a good Roman wife preferred to stay
indoors, at home.There she could devote her time to
the household, symbolized by a devotion to spinning wool. But then, the
writers
were all males.
The good wife ran an excellent household, the "domus."
The household was extremely important in Roman ideology.

It was the aristocratic husband's office. Here he met each morning with his "clients."
The clients entered the house into the atrium, a large public room meant
to show off the family. It contained the ancestral shrines, the
household gods, perhaps the marriage bed, and the loom for spinning and
weaving.

The household was also the home: Romans ate here, and the children
received their literary and moral education at home.

Above all, the good wife must stay in the shadow of her husband.

Daily life of an
aristocratic woman

Compared to their counterparts in ancient
Greece, Roman wives of the upper classes were
shocking in their visibility in public.
Married women appeared in public, with their
husbands, or with a retinue of attendants.

They went
shopping, attended festivals, sacrifices, games, and
entertainment. They acted as hostesses and dined
out. They attended women-only social events.
Aristocratic women spent a great deal of time on
personal grooming and beauty preparations.

A matrona was the ideal Roman woman:
She was married and respectable. She represented
modesty, restraint, graciousness, a sense of honor
and concern for family reputation. The most venerated
"matrona" was the elderly
patrician widow who had successfully raised children
and advanced the family's name through high moral
standards.

Work in Ancient Rome

Today, we admire
working women, but in Roman times, not so.

In an economy of scarcity, idleness
could not be tolerated. All women worked. The elite women ran their
elite households; all the other women worked with
their hands.

Women in Small Businesses

Free(d) women
might work with their husbands in wool
works, food shops, and the grocery businesses. Reliefs found in old
Ostia and in Pompeii show many such working occupations.

Still, women who worked with their hands were not
held in high esteem. In Roman law under the Emperor Augustus, adultery
began to carry heavy penalties. But it was not considered
adultery for the male if he
had sexual relations "with women who have charge of any business or
shop."

Women in
"the professions"

Women might
be priestesses outside the Vestal Virgin group, especially in the later
Roman era.

Individually, women worked as midwives, wet nurses,
and nannies. They might be hairdressers or seamstresses in an elite household.

Some Roman women were physicians, but generally Greek males dominated
this field. Highly educated Greeks arrived in droves as slaves after Rome's military successes over Greece in the 3rd
c. BC. Most were later
freed.

Women in the prostitution or acting realms were
considered particularly lowly. Their options, especially for marriage,
were more constrained than for most other Roman women.

Priestess? Bust of a young woman, possibly a priestess judging from her diadem and hairstyle. Later Roman
era. Marble. Art Institute of Chicago.